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Internet of Things from hype to reality : the road to digitization
Rayes A., Salam S., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 328 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319448-58-9)
Date Reviewed: May 18 2017

Written by two Cisco engineers (Ammar Rayes and Samer Salam), this book is a very interesting summary of all you need to know about the Internet of Things (IoT). The book is divided into 11 chapters, plus an appendix and a glossary. Although the authors have not made this segmentation, the reading of the book can be divided into three main blocks. The first block, which includes chapters 1 to 5, presents the foundations of IoT from a technical point of view. The second block, composed of chapters 6 to 8, shows the architecture-level view of IoT. The third block (chapters 9, 10, and 11) deals with the fields of application for IoT, organizations working for standardization, and open source in IoT. This last block can be seen as a miscellaneous part in which application-level and similar facts that have not been included elsewhere are presented.

The first chapter acts as an introduction to the rest of the book, starting with an overview of IoT: what it is and why now. Several real-world examples of companies working in the IoT field are provided. In chapter 2, the internetworking concept is revisited. The third chapter describes IoT in terms of sensors and actuators. A quite large series of sensors and actuators is provided. Desired characteristics and features of sensors to be used within IoT are described in detail. Chapter 4 focuses on the requirements of the networking protocols for IoT. In this chapter, the authors present the shortcomings of the standard Internet protocol (IP) to be used in IoT: very constrained devices unable to run the full IP stack, limited energy, necessity of deterministic networks, real-time network support, security and privacy, and interoperability for unified ontologies. This first block, in which I have grouped the first five chapters of the book, finishes with a highly detailed chapter on the IoT protocol stack. In this rather long chapter, the authors dive deeply into the networking protocols for IoT. They start with the link layer, describing IEEE 802.15.4 as the current core of the protocols for IoT support. After that, IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH is presented as the next-generation IoT protocol. The IEEE 802.11ah protocol is described as well, as the effort of the IEEE 802.11 task group to bring the popular Wi-Fi protocol to IoT with greater scalability and range, and much lower power consumption. After that, time-sensitive networking (TSN) is introduced. In this sense, IEEE 802.1Qca, IEEE 802.1Qbv, and IEEE 802.1CB are described briefly, as standards for TSN. Next, the authors move on to the Internet layer of IoT protocols, describing the challenges these protocols have to deal with. The 6LowPAN proposal is described as the bridge that spans the gap between personal area networks and the Internet. Some issues are briefly presented for the application protocol layer, focusing on two communication procedures: request/response and publish/subscribe. Quality of service (QoS) and RESTful constraints are explained in this section. A survey of IoT application protocols is included. Finally, the application services layer is presented with several examples of use.

The second block starts with chapter 6, “Fog Computing.” At first one may think fog computing is not actually related to IoT; however, the authors are able to unify IoT and network computing in this very interesting chapter. Fog computing brings the computing closer (either geographically and logically) to the data sources or sinks (sensors or actuators). In this chapter, the main features of fog computing are stated. The authors provide a thorough description of the characteristics, along with software and hardware enablers to achieve those characteristics. Some specific protocols are described for handling the mobility of the nodes within fog computing. In the following chapter, 7, the requirements of the services provided by any IoT platform are described. A list of functions that are inherent to any IoT services platform is provided, and every functionality is depicted in detail. This second block finishes with chapter 8, which deals with security and privacy issues in IoT. This functionality is not only analyzed at the IoT device level, but also in the fog and cloud domains. It is quite a long chapter, full of examples of different types of attacks and countermeasures. This chapter is written by one of the authors of the book (Ammar Rayes) along with another writer (Mehiar Dabbagh).

The suggested third block starts with chapter 9. Here, the authors cover several different fields where IoT can be applied, including some further explanations on the subfields in which each one is subdivided. After that, the authors explain the “anything as a service” concept. Different options and examples are described to sell IoT services to enterprises and/or clients. Finally, diverse IoT ecosystems are provided. Chapter 10 is mainly a list of organizations and their standards that are related to IoT. I found this chapter somewhat limited in terms of in-depth descriptions of the organizations and protocols involved. Chapter 11 is the last one of the book and is written by a different author, Lionel Florit. In it, open-source movement is linked to IoT environments. The author makes a strong defense of open source as an enabler for IoT, mainly due to the large reduction of costs. The chapter provides a list of open-source IoT (hardware) devices, IoT operating systems, and service platforms. The chapter is rather short and could be included as a subsection of another chapter without any significant loss.

Problems and exercises are included in every chapter, in order to provide readers with questions to be answered and ideas to be further analyzed rather than practice for students. This concept is strengthened as there is no solution sheet for the problems and exercises.

As a summary, this book is worthwhile reading for any researcher willing to enter into the IoT world. It answers any questions one may have about IoT, almost in any sense and at any level. However, this book should have undergone a much more thorough editing process with higher quality standards. For instance, some figures are useless, and others are of low quality or just too simplistic. Some chapters (that is, chapters 2, 4, and 11) are too short and generic, while others (especially chapter 5) are too large and dense. In this sense, some sections are excessively short, providing some general information that in the end is completely useless.

I would recommend this book for beginning to intermediate researchers. It will allow newcomers to acquire a good base for further learning with more specialized scientific literature.

Reviewer:  José Manuel Palomares Review #: CR145286 (1708-0492)
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